Cold Winter by Johan Nyman (C4B12)

Cold Winter by Johan Nyman (C4B12)

There are more materials than ever being regularly used in PC modding these days but one stands out as not only looking great, but is fairly easy to work with, cheap and extremely flexible. Acrylic needs little more than a Dremel to be fashioned into all sort of shapes and bending it is pretty easy and inexpensive too. There's little doubt it's one of the best places to start whether you're taking on the fun task of building your own case, or modding an existing one, perhaps with mid section enclosures to hide PSUs and messy cables, a side window or coloured details.

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Well, no prizes for guessing what material features heavily in the mod we're looking at today. Bit-tech forum member Johan Nyman has used the material extensively in his latest project, which is the third version of his original 2011 project Cold Winter, which has been revised to now include 100 per cent aluminium construction as well as provide a home for a water-cooled AMD A10-7850K. It's over to Johan to tell us how he made it.

My name is Johan Nyman, I'm 21 years old and live in Sweden. I have been messing around with computers ever since I got my first one. However, I didn't start modding until maybe 6-7 years ago.

Back then I was overclocking a lot, with that came more heat and then I started making holes for more fans and then realized that modding the case was a lot more fun than overclocking my hardware. My biggest passion is scratchbuilds and to work with acrylic to create different shapes and try to get away from the regular shapes of PC's.

I recently finished a project I call Cold Winter, I actually built the case some time ago, along the way I have been updating the hardware, cooling and so on. I went back to check when I started this project and it was in early 2011, over three years ago.

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This was my second big project and I started working on it at the same time as I was finishing my first mod, The Red One. I got some leftovers from the acrylic I used in that project so I started this build with a piece of acrylic that was bent in a U-shape like this. Then I took some steel sheets and bent those to fit together with the acrylic piece, now after three years though I wish I went for aluminum instead.

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Next thing to do was to make some holes for fans. I built this case when I was still in school so I had good tools to use. I made a 120mm hole in the front and a 80mm hole in the back panel for fans as well as made the cutout for the motherboards I/O-panel. In the front panel I also wanted a small LCD and a powerbutton so I made a hole for that too.